Brighton Festival was once at the forefront of the UK’s outdoor arts scene.  Street theatre and site-specific shows were the jewel in the Festival’s crown. Total Theatre Magazine’s editor Dorothy Max Prior reports on the state of the art in 2026, as witnessed at Brighton Festival 2026.

Brighton Festival has a long history of support for outdoor arts and site-specific performance. The legendary Streets of Brighton programme, set within the Festival, was a beacon of light back in the early 2000s, joining Manchester’s Streets Ahead and Stockton’s SIRF in blazing the way for street theatre and other work sited outside of built theatre spaces to be taken seriously by funders and audiences alike. Some of my favourite memories of those halcyon days include extraordinary works by French artists like the sadly now defunct Compagnie Jo Bithume who had a penchant for hurtling through the crowd on big mechanical constructions, and the happily still operational Transe Express with their fabulous carnivalesque processions and  enormous (25-metre) mobile rig strung with swings and hoops.

It was also a time when British street theatre was moving up to dizzy new heights of excellence. See, for example, the Improbable Theatre/World Famous Company’s Sticky, which saw an extraordinary construction of sellotape animated by pyrotechnics; and Brighton’s own Periplum who, inspired by legendary Polish company Teatr Biuro Podrozy gave us large-scale dark and broody shows such as Arquiem, The Bell, and 451. During the Streets of Brighton festival-within-the-festival there were shows in every imaginable space in the city centre – on busy streets and squares, down dark alleyways, in the parks, on the beach, along the pier… Visiting companies included Avanti Display, IOU, Desperate Men, Dot Comedy, Mischief le Bas – I could go on. These were companies steeped in the traditions of street theatre; veterans of outdoor arts creation and performance. Add to this the inauguration of the National Street Arts Meeting, which took place during Brighton Festival, giving an annual rallying point and meeting place for the burgeoning ‘outdoor arts’ community. 

Then, there were the ticketed site-specific shows such as Frantic Assembly’s Dirty Wonderland, set in the deserted Butlin’s Ocean Hotel; or the many brilliant shows by Dreamthinkspeak, in sites that included Stanmer Manor House and the old Co-op Shop on London Road; or Red Earth’s wonderful collaborations with Indonesian artists Prapto and Parmin Ras, giving us beautiful ritual environmental performance set on Queens Park lake or in Stanmer Woods.

Glory days indeed.

So what’s the state of play for outdoor arts provision in Brighton Festival 2026? Sadly, it feels like pretty slim pickings compared to former glories – but there were some fantastic exceptions. Which we’ll get to soon, but first some reflection on the broader context.

The first thing to say, obvious but needs saying, is that times have changed. In the last decade, we’ve had Brexit and we’ve had a world-wide pandemic, which have both contributed to a major shift. There is less internationalism these days – less to-ing and fro-ing for artists and companies, who are currently facing farcical restrictions in both directions: expensive visas, rising transport costs, carnet nightmares making it horribly difficult to move equipment from one country to another, and more. There are also growing environmental concerns, with some companies, producers and bookers keen to avoid shipping large numbers of people and hefty amounts of equipment across continents.

Also, in Brighton’s case specifically, key movers and shakers in the outdoor arts scene have moved on. Zap Arts have disbanded – with legendary producer Veronica Stephens now gainfully employed as executive director of Out Theatre Festival, which over the past decade or two has risen to become one of the leading lights of UK outdoor arts, Yarmouth now leaving Brighton at the starting block. 

Where are the new producers, directors and animateurs willing to work alongside Brighton Festival to prioritise outdoor arts and site-responsive performance? Where are the programmers at Brighton Festival keen to make this work a jewel in the crown for the Festival, as it once was?

Priorities would seem to have changed for Brighton Festival, perhaps nudged along by the Arts Council #LetsCreate policy (sic, with that horrible hashtag and no apostrophe) initiated in 2020, which has prioritised projects that frame the public as art-makers, insisting on ‘co-creation’ as a necessity for all funded projects, rather than leaving the artists to do what they do best – make art, which may or may not include community engagement. Speaking as someone who, for two decades, made community-engaged art and outdoor performance with Ragroof Theatre (later, The Ragroof Players), and who continues to work in this field as a solo artist, I feel – as I know many of my fellow artists do – that those of us who are experts at creating work that engages communities should be encouraged and funded to do so; but insisting everyone does it has created a situation where artistic excellence – art for art’s sake – has been somehow decried and devalued; and where people who have no desire to make community-engaged work are forced into doing so by the box-ticking nonsense that is the current Arts Council funding application process. But as I type that final sentence, news comes in to my inbox: in response to the Hodge report that criticised the current ACE policies, it has been announced (28 May 2026) that Arts Council England are abandoning #LetsCreate, which supposedly had another four years to run, with new funding criteria to be announced soon prioritising ‘quality’, chief executive Darren Henley saying that ACE is ‘committed to supporting artists, organisations, museums, and libraries to create excellent work for everybody everywhere.’ Well, let’s hope that works out!  

But whatever which way the future manifests, the days of the big and bold outdoor shows by companies steeped in the street theatre tradition seem to be over – for Brighton Festival, anyway. I miss those enormous, spectacular shows – and although I also love the smaller and more intimate work, I worry that few of the companies who really understand larger-scale outdoor arts are getting funded and programmed. 

Also, a reflection on where the work is sited. This year, very little of the outdoor arts work in Brighton Festival was presented in key sites in the centre of town – again, I suspect the funding criteria of ‘accessibility’ (which is often, these days, interpreted as reaching communities that might not otherwise engage with the Festival) dictating the trend to push work to sites outside of the centre such as Moulescoomb and Hangleton. If people won’t come in to town to see the work, then let’s take it out to them. I understand the logic, but I also miss the buzz of a city centre brought to a standstill by art and artists taking over the streets with high quality outdoor arts work.

And this year there really is very little presence for Brighton Festival in the town centre – the more commercial ventures that are part of Brighton Fringe such as the North Laine Brewery’s upstart Speigelgarden, and the embarrassingly awful Fringe City street busking, being all there is in the whole central zone of the city for most of May. ‘Festival? What festival? Oh, you mean those beer gardens?’ is a common cry from taxi-drivers and day-trippers.

One exception to this is the opening event, The Children’s Parade, presented by Same Sky – an off-shoot of the legendary Welfare State International, which was led so magnificently by John Fox (RIP) and Sue Gill. Inspired by the mother company, Same Sky create a themed procession featuring samba groups and marching bands, and a sea of sculptural structures built from hazel-wood withies and tissue paper. Each year there is a theme – this year it was ‘books’ – and the city’s schools and community organisations take on, with training and support for teachers and leaders, the making of the structures and the organisation of a processional troupe. Oh what a joy to see hundreds and hundreds of children and teenagers take over the city centre streets and seafront for a few hours on the opening Saturday of the Festival. I did my time as a parade maker and organiser (for Brighton Steiner School) and nowadays I am a mere observer – although this year my grandson took part for the first time, so I was there alongside St Nicolas C of E School cheering on their excellent Paper Dolls display and marching band. I am far from the only person in the crowd to have been involved in some way or another for the past three or four decades! The Children’s Parade – like Same Sky’s other main event for the winter solstice, Burning the Clocks – is a much loved Brighton institution. Long may they continue to stop the traffic!

I’d also like to raise my hat to Ivan Morison and Heather Peak, the creators of Soft Machines, a public artwork installed on Hove Promenade, which set out to ‘explore the bodies that make a city, and the plurality of, intimacy and desire between them’. Well, I don’t know how much of that came through, but here was something that was artistically interesting, sited in a prominent place, and which provoked reactions of all sorts from the public – for, against, unsure, puzzled, angry, delighted. 

The piece consists of a number of enormous vaguely humanoid figures, which sit on the promenade, day and night. In some lights, at some angles, and depending on the mood of the observer they are friendly giants, threatening monsters, eery Wickermen, or benign beings from another dimension. They are made out of what appears to be straw but on closer inspection is found to be a rigid mix of organic vegetable material and plaster. Small children pat them delightedly, dogs sniff them happily, cyclists and rollerskating teens whizz past them, older walkers pause to take a breath and ponder. ’Only in Brighton,’ people say with a smile. Local Facebook groups are full of commentary. For every ‘What the hell? Is my council money going on this?’ (er, no actually) there are a dozen replies along the lines of, ‘Well, I like them – they brightened up my day’. Public art of the best kind. Commendations to Brighton Festival for programming this one. A success!

Over now to the more regular outdoor arts programming. Brighton Festival is part of the nationwide Without Walls consortium of festivals, and nowadays that means that the whole of the Festival’s outdoor arts offering is two weekends of the shows chosen and presented by Without Walls. All very well and good, but it’s not enough! We need more! We need Brighton Festival programmers with a genuine interest in, and knowledge of, the outdoor arts sector to get stuck in with commissioning and programming of additional work, rather than just relying on the Without Walls programme.

The Festival also needs to take the outdoor work as seriously as the indoor theatre programme. The flyer given out of ‘Free events at Brighton Festival’  doesn’t bother to credit the artist and company names. A friend of mine phoned the Festival box office to ask for show times for one of the shows, Holy Dirt, and was told it wasn’t a Brighton Festival show – perhaps she should try the Fringe! Finding this hard to fathom, I called the next day to test the system, and got the same response. No, they have never heard of this show. I must mean the Fringe! Just because a show is ‘free to audience’ that shouldn’t mean it is devalued in this way. It is disheartening, as seeing outdoor arts as some sort of lower-grade community add-on to an arts festival is something we all fought hard against for many years. The shows are commissioned and paid for as part of Brighton Festival’s programme and all the Festival staff should be on board.

But on to the work itself. The first Without Walls weekend takes place in Moulescoombe, and features the fabulous all-female circus troupe Daughters of the Wire with Elevate Her – a ‘joyful, defiant and beautiful celebration of female camaraderie and sisterhood’ which I reviewed last year when it premiered at Out There Festival. There was also a piece by Becca Gill’s Radical Ritual, called Tender Exchange, which I was sad to miss, having witnessed her work at Inside Out Dorset 2025.

The second weekend is at Blackrock, an empty seafront lot close to Brighton Marina, outside of the town centre. There is no ‘passing trade’ – you’d only be here if you had planned to be here – which I think gives the work a different vibe. It’s theatre that happens to be sited outdoors, rather than street theatre. It’s a rather odd choice as a site. One stage is right next to the No Fit State circus tent. Another is a bit of a walk away, next to the Volks Electric Railway stop, making it a bit congested. I did try to see Talawa Theatre Company’s Fragments of Us, which features an all-Black all-male cast exploring identity through dance and spoken word, but found myself at the back of a crowd that was a confusing mix of people trying to see the show and people trying to get to the ticket office for the railway, or to the nearby toilets, and it was impossible to see anything other than the occasional elevated body. So I gave up and headed to the grass bank next to the road and car park where there were two performance sites, and awaited the next show. 

Here, Thingumajig Theatre present Kismet Walla, a gentle puppet-theatre work performed on and around a very beautiful rairi – a painted cart that provides both set and props. The two-man team, who tell the story, puppeteer, and manipulate props with skill and charm, work wonders overcoming the challenges of the site. For much of the show, their gentle soundtrack and storytelling is threatened by the loud ‘warning, vehicle reversing’ bleeps of the coaches backing in and out the car park entrance which the company are (mysteriously) placed right next to. The story told is of a South Indian odyssey as a boy grows to be a young man, embarking on a long train journey, meeting and losing his first love, and learning that people with names like ‘Ali’ or ‘Hussein’ are different to him, and need to be placed in separate train carriages – a very soft introduction to the politics of the Indian sub-continent that nevertheless hits home. No need for hammer-to-the-head polemics! The props include beautiful painted banners of wonders witnessed in the landscape passed – market stalls heaving with fruits! Luscious plants and trees! Elephants! – and a very lovely miniature train that circles the cart. A delightful show, performed with elegance and assurance by a company that have a longstanding and well-deserved good reputation for bringing puppetry outdoors.

Ferdinando + Bernstein’s Stick and Stone is a joy and a delight – which is perhaps a little surprising as it’s about climate breakdown and the awful fact that we have lost 50% of all wild things in recent human history. But hope and love are centred, along with the notion that every small positive action helps. We have choices! Let the grass grow! Leave the insects alone! Outdoor arts aficionados will be familiar with the two artists as the mainstays of veteran street theatre company Strangelings. Flick Ferdinando also worked for years with John-Paul Zacharini and later embarked on a solo career – but has now reunited with former comrade David Bernstein. And it is good to see them back together, for sure! Dressed in Pagan chic robes, carrying bundles of sticks, staves, and stones, they enter the space and give us a delightful hour of tomfoolery mixed in with some folkish songs singing the praises of various flora and fauna, and the occasional earnest speech about the loss of biodiversity. There’s lots of two-way jousting, a drum solo from Flick, and a classic clown swat-the-fly routine from David – although said fly becomes a Christ-like icon displayed on a banner held aloft, an homage to the beauty of all life on earth. Close to the end of the show, there’s a lovely scene where audience members are invited up to bear sticks and aforementioned banner and form a tableau of environmental solidarity and resistance. Great stuff!

Over the road, wedged between the No Fit State Circus tent and the car park, overlooking the beach, is a dance stage that plays host to Holy Dirt, created and performed by Vidya Thirunarayan with Dale Wylde as this season’s second performer; directed and designed by David Glass, with a soundtrack by James Foz Foster. And what an exhilarating ride this is, as Vidya – channelling the Hindu goddess Shakti (the Divine Feminine) – wages war on the patriarchy, on economic oppression, and on the mounting inequalities of the climate crisis. Her tools are clay, sand, water, stones, and of course her physical body, acting out her strength and her resistance. Feminine yes, passive and ladylike no – Vidya and her foil (animus, angel, devil, oppressor, liberator – performed with humour and sensitivity by Dale Wylde) work, play, battle, dance, flap their wings, rage against the machine – and make a magnificent mess. Foz’s soundtrack features foley and electronic sound, eerie voiceovers from a Big Brother type character (‘Do not do that!’ ‘Start work now!’), and a plethora of unusual instruments from around the world, creating haunting drones and seductive melodies, with a touch of humour in the inclusion of Chinese and Indian renderings of Disney classics. An unusual take on the notion of  World Music! This is the show’s second year, with plans to tour to many other countries. Holy Dirt is an odd amalgam of Vidya’s  Bharatanatyam Indian Classical Dance style, the classic mime and physical theatre of David Glass, and the strong interest in creating a visual theatre of striking imagery from both key artists, all held together by Foz’s excellent soundtrack. Somehow, against the odds, it all works beautifully!

Also part of the Without Walls programme is Chair! a new piece by Geraldine Pilgrim, who has made such a fantastic body of site-responsive work over the years: taking over whole empty buildings  such as the Midland Hotel at St Pancras; animating working buildings such as the East End’s Toynbee Hall or Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion; and creating work like immersive dance piece Handbag! with community participants. 

First to say: here comes another gripe about choices around site at this year’s Brighton Festival. The piece is about the disruption of our urban environment; a plea for a return of public seating and the occupation of public space, in an era when more and more outdoor space is hard to access – fenced off, or made inhospitable. It would have been wonderful to have seen this set in a busy town centre square; creating a genuine disruption of public space. As it was, it was sited on a pedestrianised quadrant in front of South East Dance’s venue, the Dance Space. It’s in a new-build backstreet with very few passers-by, so it feels an oddly dead space. 

That aside, Chair! is a delight; a clear premise well-executed by the cast of community performers recruited for the piece. There’s a parallel with Geraldine Pilgrim’s Handbag, which saw a team of community dancers enter a space one-by-one, each taking their spot and making the moment their own as they grooved along. Here, the performers again enter one-by-one, but each with a chair, which is set down and sat upon. Some have books, some have knitting, some play chess. One finds a whole tea-set in a wheelie bin and proceeds to have a refined afternoon tea; another extracts an easel and set of paints from the bin. All are making the statement that public space belongs to us all, and can and should be used. There are some empty chairs in the space and audience members are encouraged to come and sit, too. Which I do, happily. Eventually, the square starts to empty out as a pair of wardens cum street cleaners encourage people to leave, taking away their paints or chess set or tea service. Some of us resist, refusing to go – winning the artist’s approval for our resilience. Like all the other shows I’ve seen in this year’s Without Walls programme, this is a gently politically piece that manages to make an important statement without pounding the audience with polemic.

Talking of gently effective political work, a word finally about a show that wasn’t part of the free outdoor programme – it was indoors and ticketed – but a site-responsive work of the sort I’d love to see more of in future Brighton Festival programmes. Bristol-based In Between Time, in association with Brighton’s own Dreamy Place, brought an immersive sound and light installation to the dark and dank old cab run under Brighton Station. Indeed, right under the train tracks. We Are Warriors has at its heart a wonderful soundscape created with the voices of over 100 women, girls, and non-binary people. I think I was expecting a more regular spoken-word piece, but no – it’s a fabulous blend of spoken, sung, whispered, and breathed vocals; mixed with all sorts of beautiful sounds, including humming drones, percussive taps, and echoey top lines. Some sections are choral, some are solo vocals. Sometimes what is being said or sung is audible. Sometimes it is sub-voce, like a voice from a dream that haunts you in your waking hours, as you try to grasp on to its meaning. The soundscape plays on a continuous loop.

As we enter the space, we are invited to take or make a small light (teeny bulb, pin, battery) and when we feel ready, to place it anywhere we like in the space, dedicating it to someone who has been lost or silenced. I go in the early days of the installation, yet already walls and floor are filling up with the little lights. I nurse mine for a long time, listening to two full cycles of the soundscape, before placing my light on a metal post, and slowly leaving. What a wondrous experience!

More of this sort next year, please, Brighton Festival.

Featured image (top): Ivan Morison and Heather Peak: Soft Machines on Hove Promenade, Brighton Festival 2026

Brighton Festival ran 1-25 May 2026. See www.brightonfest.org 

Without Walls: https://withoutwalls.uk.com/ 

In Between Time: https://inbetweentime.co.uk/ 

Geraldine Pilgrim: https://www.geraldinepilgrim.com/ 

From Hot Peaches to Footprints of Love; from Bette Bourne in Read My Hips to Kit Green in Mrs Dalloway, queer artist, writer and producer Jeremy Goldstein tracks some key moments along the way and quotes some key voices in his ongoing journey toward truth and becoming. 

Twenty-five years ago, I embarked on a queer artistic journey called London Artists Projects – a theatre production company I set up with a mission to speak truth to power for audiences hungry for live and authentic moments of joy, beauty and meaning. Founded in response to my HIV diagnosis in 1999, LAP has evolved through thousands of queer stories from all over the world. From Johannesburg to New York City, Zagreb, Vancouver, London and into the Australian outback and beyond, queer artists and participants have taught me a lot about love, and resistance, and the joy and empowerment that comes from speaking the truth of our lived experience. 

As I approach the 25th anniversary of London Artists Projects, I’ve been reflecting on my own personal memories and lived experience of some of the queer artists I’ve worked with or admire, and how they continue to influence my own practice and path towards truth and reconciliation.

In the early days of LAP, I worked with Britain’s late doyen of high voltage radical drag theatre, Bette Bourne. Bette and I made four shows together including Read My Hips (by Ray Dobbins) with Lavinia Co-Op in 2005. The play, performed at London’s Drill Hall, was about the twentieth-century queer Greek poet Constantine P Cavafy of Alexandria, during the time that he was having an affair with a younger rent boy. Every night Vin would tear down the aile in roller skates proclaiming the interval. In Act II you could hear a pin drop as Bette would sit up in a makeshift bed (designed by Robin Whitmore) and read Cavafy’s Odyssey-inspired Ithaka. It was less a reading than a manifesto: “As you set out for Ithaka, hope your road is a long one,” it begins, “full of adventure, full of discovery.”

Twenty years on, that moment has stayed with me. Bette understood something essential: queer theatre has always been a voyage of becoming, and of self-discovery, as much as a destination. I saw that up close whilst working with Bette for over a decade, and learning about Bloolips, the anarchic theatre troupe he founded in 1977 in the wake of the Gay Liberation Front and the ‘political camp’ of New York’s gay performance ensemble Hot Peaches. 

Founded by Jimmy Camicia in 1972, Hot Peaches included Marsha P Johnson and Peggy Shaw, who in 1980 would go on to co-found the transatlantic queer company Split Britches with Lois Weaver, a former artistic director of Gay Sweatshop in London. (The third co-founder was Deb Margolin, who later left to pursue a solo performance career.)

Bloolips were hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. They produced six seasons off Broadway, and thirteen shows at what were once London hubs of queer culture including Oval House (now Brixton House) and the now defunct Drill Hall. Hot Peaches, Bloolips, and Split Britches helped shape a generation of queer working-class artists who did not see theatre as an elitist artform, but as an expression of identity, activism, community, and survival.

When I arrived in London in 1994, the political queer theatre culture of the 1980s had migrated to the ICA on The Mall. This did not happen over night. In 1976, the ICA hosted Hot Peaches in The Divas of Sheridan Square – a show which also played at Oval House, where Bette Bourne had seen it. In 1988 Erica Carter and Simon Watney organised Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics, and in 1992 Lois Keidan became ICA Director of Live Arts and put it on the map as the most exciting and interesting queer performance venue on the planet. It was then that I worked at the ICA for nearly two years and saw Penny Arcade, Tim Miller, and Ron Athey for the first time; and met queer artists and producers of my generation including Robert Pacitti, Simon Casson (co-founder and producer of Duckie, who amongst many other projects held court at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern for 25 years) and Marisa Carnesky from whom LAP would later co-commission Carnesky’s Ghost Train with Fierce in Birmingham and Queer Up North in Manchester.

I’ve lived nine lives since those heady London nights of queer culture, Britpop and politics and learnt how to live in the moment, so I asked Simon Casson, now celebrating three decades of ‘government sponsored drag’: What is the story you want to tell now?  

“Back in the day, we were gay men and lesbians, and in my culture that meant white, cis, competitive, mental, and drunk,” said Simon. “But now, with LGBTQI+ Gen Z, the queer underground is a catalyst for revolutions in gender fluidity, neurodiversity, racial justice, sobriety, and queer care. We’re learning how to love each other and show solidarity.”

I put the same question to queer artists I admire, including Argentine theatre maker Gonzalo Quintana, who directed my latest work This Is Who I Am at last year’s Queer Zagreb. 

“I am drawn to the simplicity of real stories and relationships within our communities,” said Gonzalo, “and I want to tell our stories from a place of joy, especially trans stories that challenge binary ways of understanding life.”  

All My Bodies is Gonzalo’s ongoing theatrical collaboration with Argentina’s leading trans actress and activist Maiamar Abrodose. This restorative show, which I saw at Queer Zagreb, is a deeply humane work of queer theatre. Beautifully directed by Gonzalo, All My Bodies is the dignified story of Maiamar’s transition told through all the bodies Maiamar has inhabited. It charts her relationships and life-changing decisions which culminated in her personally receiving her new gender documents from then Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in 2012. This is living breathing history from the Argentine Trans Memory Archive live on stage. 

Queer South African playwright Jason Wheeler, who I met through the most recent edition of This Is Who I Am at Market Theatre Johannesburg, is now co-curator of the Market’s inaugural queer festival in October, and says that “right now, I want to share stories of queer joy. I want to move away from the sadness so often assigned to queer stories and shift the focus to happiness and triumph. I want to demystify the myth that queerness is so vastly different and highlight the relatability found in the minutiae of daily life.”

Australian director Sean Landis is telling radical stories that heal and disrupt: “I want to tell stories that speak to my queer way of looking at the world, and stories that I recognise my friends and community in.”  Sean’s vivid production of Cruise by this year’s Olivier Award-winning actor Jack Holden, transported me back in time to 1994 – the year I arrived in London and into Soho and the ICA. This exhilarating journey into queer social history gives voice to those we’ve lost to HIV/AIDS in a single urgent monologue, and will transfer to Sydney Seymour Centre in October.

 

Sydney-based director Kate Gaul whose new play Eden took this year’s Adelaide Fringe by storm says: “Queer theatre isn’t about declaring itself; it’s about destabilising what we think we know about love, gender, and power.” Kate feels it reflects her desire for stories “that slip between forms, resist resolution, and trust the body as much as language. In that ambiguity, that friction, something honest and alive emerges”.

It’s a path which also belongs to Jen Heyes, the visionary Liverpool-based UK theatre director who directed my own activist theatre Truth to Power Café and the world premiere of This Is Who I Am in Singapore in 2022.

Jen is pioneering her own form of cinematic theatre with digital adaptations of Truth to Power Café and collaborations with queer icon David Hoyle and trans artist and performer Kit Green. During COVID, David bedazzled as Hedda in Jen’s Hedda (After Ibsen) at Soho Theatre Online; and now Kit Green steps into sixteen roles in a new live adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Described by The New Yorker as “deliciously mischievous” Kit says she wants to tell stories of resistance, transcendence, and hope – stories that capture what it feels like to be alive now.

“Virginia Woolf’s queerness isn’t about labels,” says Jen, “it’s in how people shift beyond society’s expectations in a world that embodies openness, fluidity, and what it means to be queer. Kit can dissolve into multiple characters shaped by time and memory, moving between voices and states with a precision that never feels technical, only lived, as their body becomes the meeting point between character, author, and self.” 

Blending theatre, cabaret, and film, Mrs Dalloway opens at Storyhouse in Chester at the end of May 2026 before touring to Harlow Playhouse and Wilton’s Music Hall in June, and HOME in Manchester in September.

Tom Marshman, winner of this year’s Performing Arts Legend Award in Bristol and currently making his new show Queer Glitches, is telling queer stories of digital intimacy and reflecting on how platforms like Grindr sit between liberation and disillusionment. “It offers visibility and play,” he says, “while quietly policing who belongs.”

Manchester performance legend and HIV+ activist Nathaniel J Hall is embarking on his third autobiographical solo show A-Hole to explore how queer men find pride and sex positivity after trauma. It follows First Time and Toxic, his latest explosive tale of two love junkies born into Margaret Thatcher’s Britain during the AIDS crisis and Section 28.  “I’m telling stories of shame and pride, played out over more than a hundred years of queer history,” said Nathaniel. “I feel an urgent need to tell stories that encourage radical collectivism and community, even when doing so might cause discomfort or challenge existing views.”

I found that same sense of collectivism in Sydney Theatre Company’s recent production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. Set in 1980s New York, the play, now celebrating its 40th anniversary, traces the early years of the AIDS crisis in New York, and the formation of the ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) movement and the activists who fought to be heard. At a time of renewed threats to public health funding and HIV treatments, The Normal Heart speaks directly to the present, and to the enduring power of community, embodied by internationally acclaimed performance artists Tim Miller and Paul Capsis. 

“For me right now,” says Tim, “in this moment of crisis it feels purposeful to use our platforms and pulpits to focus our high beams on injustices and make theatre and storytelling that can help us through this terrible time in the USA.” Paul, speaking from Australia, says that queer theatre must continue to give voice to communities under threat. “We must learn from history,” he says, “and record these times honestly.” 

For some it’s about showcasing artists from countries where queerness is criminalised or censored, and for others the answer lies in archives and memory. 

This year’s National Queer Theatre Criminal Queerness Festival opens at HERE Arts Centre in New York in June. Adam Odsess-Rubin who founded the Festival in 2019, says, “sharing stories from Syria, Egypt, and Palestine from artists E. Zaalan, Bazeed and Lour allows us to use comedy, music and satire to fight oppression and censorship. It creates space for queer Arab communities to flourish, laugh and dance together.”

Ana de Matos founder of the women-led Cameye Arts and creator of Footprints of Love, an LGBTQ+ living archive in East London, shares the story of Kathryn Bell, a 91-year-old woman whose home contained the complete archive of GEMMA – a magazine and social group for disabled lesbians founded in 1976. “Until we knocked on her door, no one had asked about it,” Ana said. “We’re not rescuing the past – we’re finally showing up for it.”  

Few artists speak so truthfully of our queer lived experience as Penny Arcade – New York’s reigning queen of the underground, and an oracle of queer theatre. Producing the 20th and 25th anniversary productions of Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! at Arcola Theatre and Adelaide Fringe, and Longing Lasts Longer at Soho Theatre and St Ann’s Warehouse are among LAP’s proudest achievements. Now a Guggenheim Fellow writing her memoir,Penny’s focus on the creation of community and inclusion as the goals of queer performance and archives mark her out as a true original. “True power comes from knowing the absolute truth about ourselves, and that takes ruthless honesty,” said Penny.  “As I reflecton the street queens, the mad figures of downtown New York, and the old working class,telling the story of how I became myself over seventy-five years, I must reveal what made me different from other people. The landscape between these two realities is my memoir.”

Over sixty years, queer theatre has evolved into a constellation of fluidity, protest, politics, care, and play. Like CP Cavafy’s Ithaka, we continue our lifelong journey toward truth and becoming, sustained by our collective queer consciousness of hope, love, and liberation.

Featured image (top of page): Nathaniel J Hall: Toxic. Photo Rosie Powell

For more on Jeremy Goldstein’s work with London Artists Projects, Truth to Power Café, and This Is Who I Am see LAP

For more info on Duckie’s upcoming events see Duckie

To book tickets to Cruise 9-31 October 2026 see Sydney Seymour Centre

To book tickets to Mrs Dalloway May-September 2026 see Storyhouse Chester, Harlow Playhouse, Wiltons Music Hall, HOME Manchester

To book tickets to National Queer Theatre Criminal Queerness Festival 9-27 June 2026 see HERE Arts Centre New York 

Nurturing relationships, building bridges and forging new connections are key elements of the Out There International Festival of Outdoor Arts and Circus 2026. Total Theatre Magazine’s editor Dorothy Max Prior previews this year’s event.

Brace yourself, Yarmouth – Out There Festival is back, livening up the end-of-May half-term week with a fabulous array of circus and outdoor arts performances from across the world. There’s fun for all the family with UK street theatre favourites Cocoloco, Granny Turismo, and Ramshacklicious; innovative international contemporary circus and physical theatre from the likes of Teatro Necessario, Margarida Montenÿ and Nacho Flores; and numerous exciting collaborations, such as Toulouse-based musical ensemble FÜLÜ, working with the UK’s Gorilla Circus; and Brian Eno/Jeremy Deller’s Hard Art Collective joining up with local community arts organisations to co-create a takeover of the streets.   

Out There Festival 2025 was truly something: the usual four days of intense artistic activity in the streets, parks and beaches of Great Yarmouth; coupled with the first UK hosting of the prestigious Circostrada gathering of professionals working in circus and street arts, FRESH STREET 2025; the opening of Out There’s second built venue, the Ice House; and an extensive teen-focused outreach programme of activities nurturing young journalists and producers, created in tandem with Freshly Greated. 

When I meet with Out There’s Executive Director Veronica Stephens, she says: ‘This year’s focus has been to consolidate and build on all of those successes,’ whilst immediately adding that she is in the thick of producing this year’s festival, which is hardly a step back: there are around 36 companies presenting work, so still not an insignificant task.  Of course, she’ll be doing this without simultaneously producing an enormous international conference with 400 delegates from across the world, so there is that!

What is different this year is that the Festival has been pulled back into what Veronica calls ‘a more compact footprint’. All of the street shows will be taking place within easy walking distance of the organisation’s HQ at Drill House: St Peter’s Plain, York Road and other streets surrounding the Drill House; St George’s Park and the Trafalgar Road area; and the Ice House. More on all of these sites anon!

Veronica tells me that ongoing collaborations with local partners is crucial to the Festival and to the year-round work of Out There Arts. The organisation is now a key mover and shaker in the Great Yarmouth Cultural Network (GYCN), and they are vying to become a UK Town of Culture (which is, yes, a bit like being a City of Culture but for smaller urban conurbations). With the Ice House now firmly up and running, working in tandem with the Drill House, Out There are also pushing forward plans to make Great Yarmouth a UK capital of circus.

Out There’s Artistic Director Joe Macintosh is clearly very proud of this year’s Festival offerings:

 ‘There are very many female-led companies. Less because of any strategic decisions to include them, but just because they are fantastic companies!’ 

 He cites the work of Cie Humo y Polvo, a young international company based in Brussels who are presenting both an indoor show at the Ice House, I Dreamt I Had Hairy Teeth (which surely takes the biscuit for the best show title this year), and a street show called Obsolete Elegance. Both shows are an intriguing mix of circus skills and visual theatre, with a particular emphasis on experimental design and costuming, creating images rather like moving sculptures.

‘Their work gives me new hope for the future of contemporary circus,’ says Joe,  ‘as it is both innovative and highly entertaining’. 

Another female-led show is a spectacular aerial rope piece called Blue, by Margarida Monteny, leading a five-woman team of acrobats. This will be one of the key attractions in St George’s Park this year. 

Then, there’s the Japanese female street performer Kano Mami, who Joe saw when he went on a  Circostrada trip to Japan and Taiwan, which aimed to build and grow European and Asian connections.

 ‘There are very few female solo street performers in Japan,’ says Joe, ‘and Kano Mami has not done many appearances in Europe’. 

 I’m quite intrigued by her photos, which feature her in a trademark plain blue tracksuit. There’s a lack of any kind of set, costume or props. Here, it would seem, is a performer relying totally on her ability to create ‘happenings’ in public space through her direct encounters with members of the public. I’m very much looking forward to witnessing this one! 

 Joe is also very pleased to be presenting O Quel Dommage – another female-led company made up of two women and a ‘humanette’ puppet baby, whose show Room Service looks to be a peon to bad mothering. ‘They are nothing like Paradise Circus,’ Joe says, citing one of the great successes of two years ago, ‘but they share with them an anarchic humour that some might consider bad taste!’  Sounds like my cup of tea, to be sure… Joe feels that many of our UK street theatre companies shy away a little too much from the dark side, and could learn a lot from the European companies.

 On this note, he also cites Lanordika’s Tres Tristes Trolls – a trio of male clowns from Spain/Andorra, directed by a woman.

 ‘It is skilled, charming and funny,’ he says, ‘the kind of work that we should be making here in the UK!’

 Veronica tells me about a major project that will be a centrepiece of the Festival’s offering, taking place right outside the Drill House: Up Our Street will transform St Peter’s Plain and other streets outside Drill House into a fabulous play-park.  There will be an outdoor living room – replete with an Astroturf carpet – but also real garden plants and even a garden shed (repurposed by the Let’s Grow organisation into The Magic Shed.)

 ‘It’s all about participation,’ says Veronica, ‘we are creating an immersive environment that everyone can enjoy’.

Funded by Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, and working with local community arts organisation Freshly Greated, it will be a wonderful example of collaboration and co-creation, with boundaries between professional and community arts practice dissolved.

Perennial Out There favourite The Loser’s Arcade will be core to this venture, as will Hocus Pocus, who will be running the show and integrating the community into the action. Also on board are Rudkin & Hicks with their mini-Olympics show Allympics, as are the Bureau of Silly Ideas. And there will also be three community dance groups presenting work in the site alongside a pop up orchestra from the Great Yarmouth Minster.

Reprezent will also be involved, creating a street mural and collaborating on The Public Living Room with Camerados; as will Hard Art, a cultural collective of artists, activists and scientists standing in solidarity in the face of climate and democratic collapse. This collective has a solid track record in co-creation and community participation of the highest artistic standards, having previously toured The Fete of Britain (featuring the fabulous Union Jill Flag) nationwide.

So this May, those streets around the Drill House will be buzzing with interactive art works of all sorts! 

Music is always a key feature of the Festival’s programme, and this year is no exception, with appearances from Bowjangles, who will be presenting Classically Untamed, and there is also the ever-popular African Choir of Norfolk. The delightfully dotty Rimski and Handkerchief will be roaming the streets with their bespoke mobile piano and ‘bassicle’; and the Drill House will be playing host to a full programme of Young Out There (YOT) bands and musical groups. Plus, Jake Rodriguez’ Banjo Chicken Man looks to be highly entertaining!

A major music-led collaborative work, FÜLÜ x Gorilla Circus – Live, is at the heart of the programme in St George’s Park. Joe elaborates:

‘FÜLÜ is another female-led company – by an Italian trombonist, in this case – an international collective of musicians and street theatre performers which is based in Toulouse. For Out There 2026, they will be working in collaboration with Gorilla Circus, creating a multi-artform new work.’

Gorilla Circus have an ongoing relationship with Out There Arts, who have been supporting and mentoring them for a number of years. In 2019, they worked with French company Generik Vapeur on Thank You for Having Us (Merci de Votre Accueil). Last year (2025) they created AIthentic, a large-scale show about AI staged on a big fire-truck with an enormous crane-ladder. This same structure will be used for this year’s collaboration with FÜLÜ – placed in the park, with the space further enhanced by projections on to trees, a community-engaged collaboration which will see participants’ photo portraits morphing into their favourite animals, using key lines and words from Fulu’s lyrics as inspiration for imagery.

‘It’ll be an interesting experiment’, says Joe. ‘I think the future for circus arts is cross-artform and cross-platform – finding the cross-fertilisation of ideas.’

This particular event also ties in with the Festival’s aim to bring more  international collaboration to the fore. Since the lethal double-dose of the Covid pandemic and Brexit, UK artists have been increasingly isolated from their European neighbours, with far less international exchange than before due to the difficulties (in both directions, to and from the UK) with travel, visa restrictions, carnets and other obstacles.

Other international elements to note are a contingent of Catalan performers – the relationship with Catalunya being one aspect of international collaboration that has been nurtured steadily by Out There over the years. The Catalans taking to the streets of Yarmouth this year are Pau Palaus, Pere Hosta, Tzema Muñoz, and Nacho Flores – who Joe describes as looking like  ‘a log-hurling Gristly Adams’.

Of course circus is always a key element of Out There Festival. Apart from the work mentioned above, focused around Gorilla Circus’s ‘fire engine and crane’ structure, there will be a major focus on circus companies in the Trafalgar Road sites, with a flying trapeze rig playing host to the Steal This Circus show, as well as masterclasses for circus professionals and ‘have a go’ sessions open to everybody. 

This site will also host the Italian company Teatro Necessario, who will bring us Clown in Liberta, a skilful blend of acrobatics and clowning. Teatro Necessario are based in Emilia-Romagna in Northern Italy, in a town called Colorno, just outside of Parma. This three-man team of musical clowns have been instrumental in reinvigorating the street theatre scene in Italy by hosting a festival in their home town, called Tutti Matti per Colorno – so they are experienced producers as well as veteran performers!

And the Drillaz Circus School, a year-round youth project of Out There’s Drill House, will be performing in the Festival, too. 

Whilst flagging up the circus work in the festival, we must mention The Hippodrome, Britain’s only remaining purpose-built circus venue, and a stalwart of the Great Yarmouth arts and entertainment scene. Last year, the Hippodrome was the venue for the Circostrada FRESH conference linked to the Festival; and in previous years it has hosted indoor shows that were part of Out There (including Marisa Carnesky’s brilliant Showwomen.

It is a different set-up this year as The Hippodrome, with Out There’s support, is establishing itself as a receiving house and has brokered an independent relationship between the venue and Revel Puck Circus, who usually perform in their own tent. This is a major new initiative for Hippodrome,their first ever arts-council supported project, as well as an exciting new venture for this enterprising young circus company.

 ‘It’ll be a significant experiment for Revel Puck,’ says Joe. ‘Their work straddles traditional and contemporary circus, so it could well be an excellent fit.’

Also indoors, at the Ice House, is the aforementioned Cie Humo y Polvo with I Dreamt I Had Hairy Teeth; and a new solo show from Dik Downey of Opposable Thumbs, Don Quixote. The mix within the programme of veteran performers like Dik Downey and younger artists like Dik’s former collaborator in Opposable Thumbs, Adam Blake (who this year is presenting his own company Adventure Arts’ The Wizard and the Mechanic) is something that Out There Festival directors Joe and Veronica are proud to be promoting.     

A flag-up also of another interesting collaboration: the Southbank Centre are bringing their own bus up to Yarmouth to host A Poet in Every Port. It has just been announced that Roger McGough will be on board! It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out within the context of an outdoor arts festival. In some ways, it’ll be like an alternative iteration of a booth show – street theatre audiences do like popping into sheds, tents, booths – and buses – for something a little more intimate than the big outdoor shows.

All in all, an Out There Festival line-up that is offering something for everybody. Big spectacular shows, intimate encounters, the chance to get involved and make and do…  it’s all there for the taking.

‘I’m really proud to be part of such a brilliant festival, since its inception 18 years ago, and to see it grow and evolve,’ says Veronica. ‘The artistic quality is outstanding – the best! The Out There Festival programme is bold, ambitious, exciting, pushing boundaries while warmly inviting people in, and making space for communities to express their creativity. A big thank you to the whole of the Festival team – you are all amazing!’

Featured image (top): Margarida Montenÿ. Photo Luisa Valares.

The Out There Festival 2026 will take place in the streets and outdoor spaces of Great Yarmouth from Thursday 28th to Saturday 30th May.

Full programme: https://outtherearts.org.uk/out-there-festival/2026-programme/

Great Yarmouth based, but collaborating internationally, Out There Arts – National Centre for Outdoor Arts & Circus is a registered charity and Arts Council funded National Portfolio Organisation dedicated to supporting excellence in the development, creation and presentation of new and high quality artistic work, delivery of outstanding circus and outdoor arts festivals and events for and with diverse local communities and wider audiences.

Out There Arts shares Great Yarmouth’s vision as the UK Capital of Circus. Our focus on circus and outdoor arts grows naturally from this seaside town’s rich performance heritage, providing an accessible medium to support their work.

Produced by Out There Arts, the Out There Festival is now the region’s largest free festival of street arts and circus and regularly attracts audiences in excess of 60,000 people. We work with artists, communities and partners to deliver on agendas including: culture, youth, education, community, regeneration and health & wellbeing.

www.outtherearts.org.uk 

Why would Liz Aggiss premiere her new show Crone Alone in a former miners’ welfare institute in a remote part of Northumberland? Creative producer Lisa Wolfe explains what The Tute has that bigger and better-funded venues in the UK lack. 

“I never in a million years thought I would have my own space,” says dancer and performance maker Esther Huss. We’re sitting together in that space; an ex-miners’ welfare institute called The Tute, on a street facing the disused railway line that blocks access to the sea.

This is Cambois (pronounced Cammus) an isolated former mining village on the southeast coast of wild and beautiful Northumberland. 

Esther moved here in 2019 with her now-husband, playwright Alex Oates, not knowing anyone. He has family in nearby Whitley Bay, but for Esther this was a leap of faith. “People are very open here,” she says, “but it was lonely. I started with the feeling “today I am going to make a friend’”. That’s a hard enough task at primary school; in your early forties, and coming from a vibrant arts scene in London, it must have been hugely daunting. It was the space that spoke to them first. 

Built in 1929, with a decorative barrel roof, wooden floor and curious side rooms, its rough and readiness was instantly welcoming. Prior to the pit closures it hosted brass bands, film nights and no doubt some fiery union meetings. Esther began using it as a rehearsal space for her own commissioned work and fell in love with the building and the potential it held. She started a dance group, and Alex a writing group, putting leaflets through doors. Slowly interest built in what they were offering, and people began to come.

For Alex, the impetus was partly frustration at a lack of vision from the large regional organisations whose remit, and funding, is to work with communities. Cambois seemed ignored, as were his approaches for a conversation. For the first three years they raised money through community funds, working unpaid, until they could register as a charity and begin to broaden their options. Somewhat inevitably the landlord put the rent up, and raised the asking price for the lease, but the financial position, while still precarious, is at least more stable. 

Five years of hard graft – and two children – later, between them Esther and Alex have not only made friends, they have also built a strong participant base for dance, writing and art classes and a children’s playgroup. They take work into schools and connect with local groups and businesses when opportunities arise. 

The Tute’s most ambitious undertaking is the Rude Health Festival which they launched in 2024, tag-line ‘Because Creativity is Healthy’. Over two months the Festival embraces all genres of the arts, mixing classes with performances and films, with multi-cultural events indoors and in the landscape. Esther and Alex programme artists whose work they admire; those who create with integrity and who they know will surprise, delight and quite possibly challenge the audience. It’s this holding tight to their principles that sets The Tute apart, and is why I’m here this weekend, getting a full blast of Northumberland weather, art and hospitality. 

I’m here with Liz Aggiss for the premiere of her new show, Crone Alone; which came with a related workshop, and a film screening…

In 2019 the supernova of avant-garde dance Liz Aggiss performed an excerpt of her first new show since 2016’s internationally acclaimed Slap and Tickle. 

Programmed by Sadler’s Wells Elixir Festival, which celebrates ‘the artistry of the older dancer’ her persona in Crone Alone was described as “charismatic to the point of perplexing” by Matthew Paluch, in his SeeingDance review. It took another five years, and much re-working, for her to show it again, presented as a work-in-progress at South East Dance in Brighton, in August 2025. 

Given the demand for her work from promoters and festivals across the globe, how exactly, and why, particularly, has she chosen to premiere the new, full version here, at The Tute, in a place with no shop, no post-office, no café, no library, no doctor and barely a bus? 

 “I knew I was going to love it just talking with Esther,” says Liz. She had read about her and The Tute in a 2023 Guardian article and got in touch. Over a long career latterly defined by relentless touring, Aggiss had no desire to pitch Crone Alone to the vagaries of the current venue and festivals circuit. The ethos and ballsiness of Esther and Alex appealed to her; the idea of playing to an audience that doesn’t know her or what to expect, of fitting herself and the show into the opposite of a black box theatre humming with technology. 

They talked, and Esther was clear that Liz needed to come for a week, stay locally, mix with the community, and run a workshop for the regular dance group.

She would also co-host an evening of short films, Women, Dance and The Sea, by female artists, including one by Esther and Katja Roberts filmed on Cambois sands; and the Liz Aggiss and Joe Murray 2011 classic Beach Party Animal. Finally, she would perform Crone Alone.  

In her programme note Liz says: “I’ve missed the delight in sharing, communicating and revelling in performance. So I thank The Tute for shoving me back in the limelight and giving me the opportunity to reconnect with my former self… and to bring this work to a new and equally unsuspecting audience.”

With its intricately constructed mix of music-hall tropes, personal revelations, elegantly wrought choreography, and wondrous costume reveals, Crone Alone astounds and delights this rookie audience. An instantaneous standing ovation is the only possible response. The piece poses a question about individual and collective value and worth, in life and in the arts, that resonates with everyone present. 

With their determination that visiting artists dig in and get to know the area and the people, Esther and Alex are enriching the lives of this community and proving that culture really can lift people beyond their expectations. “There’s a lot of people that have been on a real journey with us,” says Esther. “They begin feeling ‘do I have place here? What is this?’ and now regularly come back.”

Becca Sproat was their first volunteer, having got in touch after spending 16 months at home during lockdown. “She’s our pillar,” says Esther, “she comes to everything and is in all of our groups, completely out of her comfort zone a lot of time”. Even more gratifying is that Becca’s family has started to attend events too – and it’s this gradual process of acceptance and personal development that fuels The Tute team. 

This year’s Rude Health Festival culminates with a scratch performance of From The Sea, a new play by Alex featuring the stories of people with lived experience of asylum seeking, directed by Amy Golding. He’s tentative about how it will be received: Cambois sits in within the district of Blyth, a Reform stronghold. Strong anti-immigrant rhetoric is prevalent throughout the community, from the school-gates to the Cambois Club bar. With their children growing up here, the couple are taking every opportunity to try and open conversations that counter prejudice.

That’s why Rude Health includes artists from diverse backgrounds such as Yuvel Soria, whose work explores his Bolivian culture, and the Indian Kuchipudi dance of Payal Ramchamdani, both based in Newcastle.

In Crone Alone Liz has a catchphrase “just try and stop me” and it applies equally to her own thirst to create and perform as it does to The Tute’s power couple. When the national arts news is dominated by headlines about institutional mismanagement and lack of engagement, when the Chancellor’s latest budget shows zero interest let alone support for the creative industries, when theatres are closing almost as fast as pubs, isn’t it time for a new, nimble, artist-led model? For The Tute to go from an empty, forgotten space to a finalist in the 2025 North East Culture Awards (Best Museum or Cultural Venue) is a well-deserved accolade. 

The pits closed in 1968, the railway three years earlier. Rows of terraced houses were demolished and not replaced. Companies promising growth and investment move into the area but don’t deliver; battery manufacturer Britishvolt notoriously went bust after two years. A massive QTS data campus is planned for the area, offering some sponsorship but few jobs.

Meanwhile, two artists are bringing together a network of colleagues and big gang of supporters, making and sharing some of the best creative experiences in the country. So let’s toot a horn for the Alex and Esther’s of the world, the artists who join them and the communities that get involved. It is they who, with grace, imagination, ingenuity and grit, enrich all our lives.

Featured image (top): Liz Aggiss: Crone Alone at the Tute, December 2025. Photo Luke Waddington.

The Tute is a hub of creativity located in an old miners’ welfare institute in the heart of Cambois, a coastal community in Southeast Northumberland. From this atmospheric space, The Tute is gently transforming Cambois and fostering social growth for the better. It is recognised that this area is at a turning point, and there is a growing need for meaningful engagement to support the changes ahead. The Tute’s goal is to build empathy, alleviate social isolation, and enhance aspirations through the arts. https://thetute.uk/   Facebook: @TheTuteCambois | Instagram: @thetute_cambois

Liz Aggiss is a Brighton-based, award-winning performer, director, choreographer and writer. For the past 45 years she has been re(de)fining her own brand of contemporary dance performance, dodging categorisation and being classified as unclassifiable. Blurring the boundaries between high art and popular culture, she makes uncompromising, challenging, feminist work. www.lizaggiss.com 

Crone Alone has been programmed for Brighton Festival 2026. Dates tbc – see updates on the website. The Festival runs Saturday 2 May till Monday 25 May: www.brightonfestival.org

Pain, humiliation, pressure, panic… Kunal M Rajput enters the world of Dark Clown, courtesy of the legendary Peta Lily, and lives to tell the tale.

Few encounters in an artist’s life truly unsettle the ground beneath their practice, but Peta Lily’s Dark Clown did so for me. I attended Dark Clown – An Experiential Talk at the first Bouffon Festival in London in October 2025, where Lily delivered a performance-lecture of remarkable precision and intellectual depth. What struck me first was her command of the room, a performer guiding an audience with the charm of her performance and the sensitivity of a teacher. The experience was unlike any session-performance I had attended. It was not only that the aesthetic reached for darker tonalities within the clowning palette. It was that the event forced a reconsideration of what theatre asks of its audiences, what it demands of performers, and how actor training equips practitioners to meet both craft and conscience.

Lily trained with master teachers including Jacques Lecoq, Philippe Gaulier, and Monika Pagneaux, amongst others, and she has spent decades practising the craft, performing and training performers around the world whilst refining what, since its inception in the early 1980s, she has called Dark Clown. Her care with language is striking. She reminded the audience that her form is not violent-clown or horror-clown but an extension of clowning’s expressive range and dramaturgical possibilities. Dark Clown draws on the technical foundations of red-nose clowning such as rhythm, elasticity, and timing, yet it relocates the clown into situations specifically designed to release what she calls ‘Marginalised Emotions’ such as pain, humiliation, pressure, panic, oppression etc. The laughter that emerges is not simple release. It is what she calls ‘Troubled Laughter’, a tightening of breath that blends relief with a sense of shame. Imagine actors in the near-death scene of the movie Final Destination being able to make the audience laugh at their life-or-death moment.

The origin of the form illustrates its philosophy. In 1980 at the ICA, Lily watched a scene in a show in which a prisoner was compelled to perform for his captors within a totalitarian regime. He sang, moved, and struck his head with a metal tray. The scene was both grotesque and absurd. The audience laughed, although they sensed they should not. Lily mentions that she felt a sharp sensation in her body in that moment of laughter, which she later named ‘troubled laughter’. This physiological detail is not anecdotal alone. Neuroscience suggests that spectators mirror rhythm and breath, meaning theatre’s impact is not limited to thought but resonates through the body. Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdung or alienation effect sought to unsettle audience’s thought, whereas Dark Clown unsettles audience’s breath. The performer becomes a conductor of audience physiology: coaxing, pressing, and releasing. In doing so, they implicate the audience. Spectators feel complicit in what unfolds and understand, at a visceral level, the moral stakes.

This, I believe, is the political potency of the practice: not argument delivered through rhetoric, but argument felt through the body.

Some young actors may initially perceive Dark Clown as ethically uncertain or harsh, but Lily avoids anything gratuitous. She begins sessions with content notes and wellbeing guidance, emphasising that Dark Clown is a disciplined craft rather than a pursuit of shock. She distances it from horror tropes and cynical clowning. Instead, it opens a path toward emotions that often sit at the margins: distress, shame, panic, humiliation, dread, and existential unease. Safety remains central. The actor does not need to rely on personal trauma. Imagination and craft carry the work.

Lily’s methodology is pragmatic and specific. One strand focuses on comic technique, such as motif, rhythm, and contrast, which are rooted in red-nose clowning. Another strand trains performers to inhabit impossible circumstances with conviction. The final strand demands the capacity to calibrate and respond to an audience in real time. This structure offers actors significant advantages: it allows them to explore intensity and extremity without mining personal trauma. Instead, it encourages imaginative commitment rather than self-exposure, while still maintaining the inner sense of play of the red-nose clown.

A crucial requirement of the form is believable suffering. Dark Clown relies on audiences accepting the reality of distress or pressure: if the portrayal seems false or indulgent, the implicating effect collapses. Lily contrasts her practice with shock-based performance, which often centres on the performer’s thrill. Dark Clown is not built on transgression. It is built on calibration. She cites a circus scene where a small clown receives repeated electric shocks while a larger clown controls the dial. The audience laughs even as the discomfort grows, and the guilt that follows sharpens rather than erases the humour. This tension is not a desire for cruelty. It is a deliberate dramaturgical device that prompts spectators to question their visceral reactions.

I believe this implicating effect is political at its core. Political theatre is often expected to present arguments to be effective, yet Dark Clown shows that political insight can emerge through physical sensation. A tightening of the diaphragm, a flicker of guilt, an altered breath: these physiological responses create a different cognitive terrain. A room that laughs with unease becomes alert, unsettled, and no longer a passive witness. This shift echoes one of theatre’s oldest functions: the transformation of human consciousness. Here the transformation arises from discomfort, and Dark Clown offers a contemporary way of producing that cathartic shift. It brings shame, horror, and release into an interplay that shapes the audience’s moral sense, all through the implicating effect at the heart of the practice.

The form is also rich for actor training. Many drama schools now treat emotional vocabulary in training as too subjective or risky, but Dark Clown provides a structured mechanism for actors to engage rigorously with difficult feeling-states. Dark Clowning exercises such as competitive crying rituals, guilt-based panels, or prisoner-games are not sensational tricks. They serve as rehearsal grounds for ethical decision-making and for sustaining extreme contradiction while holding an audience’s attention. They prioritise the performer’s wellbeing while extending their expressive range.

Dark Clown is, above all, a craft of attention. It refines rhythm and escalation, teaching actors how to intensify moments without slipping into melodrama. It also sharpens the ability to sense and respond to an audience’s breath, encouraging performers to maintain an internal clown even within naturalistic work, keeping spontaneity alive. These skills are transferable, allowing performers to escalate tension without excess, implicate without exploiting, and make an audience feel the moral cost of laughter in problematic contexts. In this sense, Dark Clown teaches play and stakes within dramaturgy as much as comic technique for an actor.

If theatre hopes to poke and provoke us, Dark Clown is clearly one of the important instruments. It brings discipline to discomfort and responsibility to provocation. It guides audiences toward uncomfortable truths without abandoning care for the performer. Troubled laughter becomes a mirror that reflects complicity and empathy at once. At a time when performance often feels cautious or overly cerebral, Dark Clown brings feeling back to the centre of craft and restores theatre’s essential promise: to unsettle, to move, and, when the moment is right, to implicate us.

Featured image (top): Hamlet or Die, devised and directed by Peta Lily for Hong Kong Mime Lab 2000. Photo Esvigo.

For more on Peta Lily’s work, see www.petalily.com

For her blog on Dark Clown see here.

You can follow her @petalily on Instagram and Facebook.

Kunal Rajput attended Peta Lily: Dark Clown – An Experiential Talk at the world’s first Bouffon Festival at The Pen Theatre, London, 16 October 2025.

Kunal Rajput took part in Peta Lily’s Clown and Dark Clown Workshop in August 2021.